January 2002

Every day is like jazz improvisational, though played by old, tarnished instruments, accompanied by the familiar, mighty voices of our personal narrative depicting in overlapping notes the many depths and heights of experience and emotion.
I can recount many instances when my unassailable belief in art and creativity saved me from complete despair when even religion couldn't. Religion is a messenger pigeon that lost its way, rebelled against its eventless route, delivering the most profound message by freeing itself into greater distances. And ideally, God wasn't enraged or offended, but delighted and himself unfettered from man's bondage, man's cumbersome and outdated Book of arrested beliefs.
But let us return to jazz and its numerous sumptuous rooms whose soft walls swell and sink as if breathing the human experience in an embrace of two sensual bodies- one of luck and instrumental coincidences, the other of destiny, life as musical prodigy. A place where our dreams assume form and color and one's personal history remains an experimental canvas, not a nostalgic hindrance. A space in which the body may forget its many ailments and imperfections and thus melt from underneath us so that for one vagrant beat in a lifetime of strict arrangements we may feel genuinely freed by our vulnerability and unencumbered by our pasts and phobias.
Jazz takes intimate risks, reinvents itself in the moment, assumes no single identity, is at once self-certain and nameless, teaching us to hear without concentrating on the physical act of listening, to feel without tempering ourselves and our emotional capacity, to move with the gravitational force of its sudden and uninhibited flirtations with tempo, and question our daily patterns of perfunctory attachments by instilling in our hearts' locks the resounding ivory keys of curiosity, not tone-deaf doubt.
Jazz, sultry or frivolous and unkempt, is the agoraphobic's defiant lure to rootless, fearless world travel, lifting like a flying carpet our many complacent, self-imposed bans, turning rigidity into wishbones, cutting with decisive brass sheers the numerous invisible steel threads of our self-censored indignation, granting vocabulary to our otherwise ineloquent struggles with fear and self-loathing, tearing us violently apart from our high-priced comforts.
Jazz accompanies us through all dull and vacuous moments, reminding us with drumming fingertips that sometimes it's better to forget and be forgotten than balefully remembered. Jazz is the night hallucinogen, the trailing visions of which possess more significance and symbolic truth than an entire city revealed at the toll of a merchant dawn. It is the one place ahead of time, above all rooftops, where your intolerance with logic, structure, discipline and practicality isn't your downfall, but a strength. It is the fire that catches you, carrying you unscathed through sub-temperature streets of human indifference. It is the tornado that builds instead, erects monuments and fosters community. It is a sentient savage. Light that dances gingerly on liquid surfaces. The diamond chandelier that would rather risk its grandeur than dangle in lightless limbo another night. It is the ocean that fell in love with a desert and spent eternity kissing sandy shores. It is a delicate cactus flower. An unmapped city. The trick in trickling raindrops that lull insatiable women. It is the whiskers that enable an unlucky cat's perfect high fall. It is the flightless bird's supreme daydream of limitless skies. It is a drag queen's flawless overture. The insomniac dawn. The square inside every circle. The texture of every fabric. The phantom hand that refuses to forget how it felt to touch his face.
Jazz is the many possible sounds of a single syllable. The dramatic pause of passion between night and day. The shrill play of island children. A buoyant anchor. Androgynous child who baffles even nature's nightly labels. The impossible wish that survives the sobering glare. The intoxicating hour that drinks of its own drunken moments. High precipice of a well-kept secret. It is the benign beast that swims gracefully in the clearwater channels of a child's wildest imaginings. An avalanche of a myriad coincidences. A last afternoon in Brazil. A single kiss that changed many lives. A dangerous confession. The rumbling sigh of a rogue iceberg. The sudden disappearance of borders. An erotic marriage of ideas and emotions. The telling whisper of a seashell. An unlikely smile. The glee of a heart that feels no longer broken.
Jazz is a rainforest that's protected by an unbreakable spell. It is an undiscovered species. A burning cathedral. The water well that one unassuming morning began to offer gold. A garden whose fragrant flowers move about freely. A poisonous snake and snake charmer. An affair in Marrakesh.
Live your life like jazz.
Thematic, cinematic escape. These words and escapist phrases are breadcrumb clues to my capture. New life in an oasis encampment, the high walls of which are fashioned out of bamboo poetry. Poetry that blindfolds me strategically with small, patient, rice paper kisses, instructing me in a language I've never heard in all my flights and past detentions, but to which, like narrow and intuitive escape, I naturally and silently respond. I comply because I know by now that it is better to adhere to figurative lashings than suffer life's literal and ineloquent blows.
Wet phrases like kisses have sealed my eyelids, which are superfluous anyway. Here, one sees every minute detail without eyes, by feeling, like Braille. Outside of here it is always the same unilateral scenario. I would rather be enslaved by rhapsody, identifying wholly with my captor.
It doesn't much matter who he is and what he looks like, where he comes from. What lasting, useful impressions and opinions can we observe and form with our senses that we cannot effortlessly gather from our own imagination, which revives significance far more effectively in life than life on the outside with all its conditional liberties? These small flights in confinement afford me more freedom and motion than high-speed departures on asphalt highways and actual bridges.
The earth of the diary is moist beneath my touch, cool, fecund, fragrant, smelling strongly of rich dualities, where perfectly measured doses of life blossom in the sun of erogenous reveries, the unsophisticated minutes of which dangle dangerously from garlands of desire, perversity, fantasy, their hooks piercing the flesh of my life outside the page. My persona emerges from the page perfumed by distractingly sensual language and playful riddles otherwise missing from my days.
Panther of poetry keeps black vigil, and I have yet to see my captor's face, but it doesn't matter. Anonymity survives long after blindfolds and masks have been removed. It also doesn't matter that I don't understand his language; our exchanges aren't verbal, philosophical, actual, intellectual. We communicate via ambient textures, imprints.
And while he has complete control over me he does not violate me. How can he? He is a figment with flickering limbs, vacuous veins that lack the pulse to engage an erection. He is here, but impotent. Inchoate. And yet, he is resourceful and excavates the mangled goad from ash-blanketed tombs of my farthest reaches, the deepest caverns of my insecurities and associations, urging me violently, rhythmically, marching me into vulnerability, a private, symbolic, rugged journey into the Amazons of my sexuality where the stifling, oppressive jungle heat is familiar and reminiscent of other numerous attempts at overcoming immense phobias, shyness, shame.
He may possess me but he would not exist without my compliance. He may march me but I navigate him. Without my will he would instantly perish. So, together, in neurotic partnership, we journey across the creative continent, in the pregnable soil of which our combined dreams may take root despite the impossibilities, sprouting new meaning, coloring the petals of stagnant ideas with significance, revealing who and what we truly are in this dark, sensual, and oftentimes disturbing maze of multicultural contradictions. I want to disown my Assyrian, Iranian, and American untruths.
I smoke lazily in this noon dream, in sagging blue jeans. Just as my body falls apart so too the walls of creativity, which began to peel and crack years ago, with resolute momentum crumble. But why should the words come at such a high price? Why should I have to live a certain way, take drugs, go into such darkness to fetch the words, and fight my way back with them stacked in my arms, pressed against my heart, some of them slipping and falling? Returning from the page to dizzying tariffs, taxed.
Again I've outgrown the womb and the umbilical cord warps round my throat as it did in my original birth, almost killing me. My mother cried when I was born- blue, shriveled, my body covered in a kind of vestigial hair. She was horrified by how ugly I was. They placed me in an incubator- the hair fell off, the wrinkles faded, life returned to my limbs. When they brought me to her my mother cried again, this time with joy. "You were the most beautiful baby. You had completely transformed. You had milky white skin, were plump, and had a beautiful head of curly hair."
This birth too is asphyxiating. Vehement cries of joy and grief collide in a wintry room where birth and death meet in a mutual moment, in an unlikely expanse of total intimacy, brushing against each other in a flash within centurial folds of which death becomes our lifelong friend.
My poor body, its twin lungs strain to fill with air, its back weighed with knotted tension, its small artist hands frozen and a bluish pink color, its statuesque head easily drained of blood each time I forget and stand up abruptly, dizzied in cumulus white flashes, so that I have to bend forward long enough for the blood to return to its rivulets.
Is it worth it to live a fast, short life that's bursting with creative impetus, though wrought with addiction, or is it better to trudge through the many prosaic days of a long healthy life that may or may not inspire, move, and open me further creatively, essentially, artistically?
This question daily unfolds its silk petals like an exotic flower whose sheer glory entices curiosity and further mystery, but the answer lies in its poisonous thorns that diligently guard its secrets. But what the flower doesn't seem to understand, though longstanding and well-equipped, is that my commitment to living, dying, and writing, though at times tentative, is obsessional. My need is single-minded, my urge to undergo unreality just to attain a single sonorous sentence is utterly illogical, far more venomous than any flower or animal. I may be weak, I may be mentally ill, I may be many ignoble things, but I have a volcanic core.
I'm not one to boyishly wrestle a magic, a mystery, or intimidate a revelation, bully a skittish poetic phrase, but I am vastly patient, sitting meditatively with the tenaciously rooted question whose distrusting eyes scrutinize my presence with nervous annoyance, knowing that in time the mystery and I will grow accustomed to each other's presence, forgetting our previous relationship, dropping our guard, and much to our surprise forming a brotherhood of quiet reverence in the many changing seasons of the garden of poison and poetry, drinking the same rain, suffering the same storms, basking in the thousand silk-strand rays of the same sun.
Living thus within the stone walls of the garden of my creative destiny, with total commitment to its every grass-blade moment, its every perennial lesson, its ever-changing color of every turning leaf, its every insatiable parasite and incurable plague, I will surely come to understand that the answers I brashly finagle out of the steel petals of life's obdurate silences do not exist in intimidating mathematical formulas or golden rhetoric, in exotic distances and coquettish horizons, but inside all daily tasks and exchanges, in commonplace and mundane events, in the varied lives of people we know, in otherwise unromantic happenings, and that creative inspiration and incentive do not have to be epic. Inspiration does not exist elsewhere but where your rootless feet happen to be planted at any given moment. And most profoundly, creativity remains the suspended embryo in the prolific womb of a writer's own courage and willingness to simply write.
My Everest fears of writing something dishonest, something unmoving, something burlesque and irresponsible, have successfully censored my dirigible hand even in the private confines of my own diary; not to mention, these seemingly insurmountable fears have smartly disarmed me in places and matters outside the page. It's obvious that the longer I wait for the perfect moment, the most favorable conditions to come sweep me to that productive haven of my unrealized potential, delivering me in a fairytale carriage lined with sumptuous fabrics, the more crippling this procrastinating will become, and I will discover that I have been all talk and no written word. The sooner I begin my perilous nosedive into shallow, immature attempts the sooner I may exorcise shallow, immature writing out of my body and being, and somewhere amidst the dead drafts and body bags of bad prose hear the delightful baby-talk beginnings of my nascent and original writing voice, and perhaps begin to heal emotionally as well.
I want the numerous flailing extremities of my imagination stretched and strengthened into many inhospitable and unmentionable directions. Focus the scratched lens of my pristine soul, despite alluring, destructive reflexes, onto picturesque reveries whose flighty lyrics I might lasso with this braided hunger for beauty despite the reality, and brand the disorderly words with the very embers of my unwavering belief in beauty, onto sumptuous pages bound by blood and semen's connective properties, into one triumphant but humble offering, defiantly to a disconnected world that on many occasions dismissed and severed me, but could not break or silence me.
A quiet evening at home, unable to imagine what it would be like to be on cold, crowded, city streets, all those unimpressive shining men, ingenuous only in mediocre doses. Listening to Swing Out Sister's Filth and Dreams, smoking a slender brown cigarette. Our fat stout Christmas tree tilts more and more to one side like a model who has tired of his pose. Been somewhat consumed by wistful reveries and memories of Tariq, in a secret way longing for his company, his rich voice, his bedroom eyes, his attention, a telephone call. But I fully accept our distant bond, even as he occupies my heart, a vaporous presence lacking flesh but retaining immense warmth, evoking immediacy. Am I supposed to deny this love for him that is autonomous? Am I also then to stop loving Iran, my childhood, my father, anything and anyone who is not in sight? It will not happen!
I've stopped taking the antidepressant and am sipping red wine. Sobriety is vital but only in small doses. What good is lucidity if it's uptight, restrained? I enjoy life's illusions, its intoxicating moments, mannerisms, mimes, and slinking movements.
The sky may darken. I refuse to.
A friend once observed that I have a gift for identifying with all people and things. She misinterpreted a fine curse against which I continue to rebel. Some choose, or can't help but breeze through this beautiful nightmare, but I can't seem to be able to avoid its stench and perfume permeating the silk robes of my myriad monothematic dreams of lavish love and laughter- ghostly aspects in wakefulness that help filter the harrowing glare of lackluster loneliness. I anticipate the music and mischief of the unconscious, living in a somnambulistic state. I want to be awake and live, avoiding the corrupting catapult and cadence of our mind's meander and march through the foggy marshes of wasteful sleep.
The wine issues claret warmth to the pallor of my dreams' frostbitten fingers.
Corinne Drewery of Swing Out Sister sings in a voice rich with many well-tailored textiles that possess edges with spirited tassels, delightful patterns, moving paisley, textures dyed by generous hands in shades of earth, rain, fire, diaphanous fabrics rippling like a universal flag in winds of unity, emotive folds within which lyrics are artfully punctuated, syllables granted motion and height. A voice that deftly guides the listener into shimmering depths devoid of emotional depressions, replete with sensations one typically encounters in recalling a dream in which he is thrown from great heights only to gingerly land into further dreams, exhilarated. A voice whose commanding range emboldens the charmed heart to take soulful flight into instrumental apexes where orchestral clouds collide, concocting melodic rainstorms, each individual drop a crystalline note arranged with mindfulness to artistic integrity, yet frivolous, playful. A voice like the fateful journey of an unmanned paintbrush sweeping across floating surfaces, each bristle made of nuances found in longing, curiosity, every mellifluous stroke discovering and coloring itself into existence. Corinne's long-armed singing reaches through the obdurate limits of space, the possessive borders of the material world, outsmarts the gravity police, melts gold, gallops, stands still but reverberates, illuminates the moment, kisses a melody with liquid lips, with silk chains captures mercurial secrets and with silk smile releases them into the night as simple truths, rearranging constellations. A voice that cuts its own veins, pouring life generously into gardens of harmony. Listening to Swing Out Sister is tantamount to hearing love.
So, here I am, Assyrian and queer in Marin of all places in the world, sipping water, Simon dozing and dark grey at my feet, Vanessa giving herself a pedicure, Ben writing with a wide-eyed face that's tonight distant and perplexed, while I balance on ropes between high words, occasionally taking a misstep that changes the face, the fate of every sentence, trying to comprehend the synergistic existence of these diplomatic contradictions that are the very waves, depths and surfaces, storms and calms, beasts and men, liquid rhythms despite which I continue to dream and drown in a love for syllables and escape.
In a fatal storm of dissipating certainties I survive only by seeking the shelter of love that's reflected in the fast flux of relationships, flash flood glimpses of hope, canopy of memories, nostalgia, the flavors, the lovers, laughter, conviction, joys whose abandoned palaces still ring with music and conversation, years when anything was still possible, simple pleasures, music, nature, manicured garden caresses violently washed by mudslides of forgetfulness.
I'm hoping that being presently suicidal is only symbolic of the death of my outdated attachments, ideals, opinions, insecurities- essential death we fear because death and change signal traumatic rebirths, effort, labor, requiring our undivided attention and presence of mind when we'd rather drown our concerns and duties in drink, drug, mate, work, hobby, obsession, in the great elsewhere of merriment, out bar windows.
I dreamt that Tariq was sexually vulgar, waving his penis crudely in my face, and I was outraged by his infidelity to Raymond.
It's obvious. I may have left Columbus that July, but my soul still basks in the sun of that long ago summer of first love. My elephant soul whose unfailing memory is a trunk full of romantic nights woven from the entanglement of our limbs sooner or later sobers from bubbly reveries and suffers a mammoth hangover. I recuperate at the bottom line. I love Tariq. Always will. Without expectations or reservations. Not because I am obsessed but because he touched my life with imperfect hands that to this day burn my skin with phantom strokes. I love him from the eye of every spontaneous storm, from the distant shores of every electric memory, with microscopic pangs that are larger than life.
I can still taste the streets we walked, sometimes a thousand miles apart, sometimes sharing a shadow. I can taste the sudden Midwestern thunderstorms that could rattle windows and telepathically set off car alarms, but failed to equal the pantomimic storms that were sparked by our disparate needs, wishes, joys, attraction and repulsion, love that was, love that was not.
I can still taste every square inch of our short-lived bedroom where lights from passing cars courted shadows across the ceiling, his long outline next to mine, his quiet breath, his pain that was as palpable and present as an instrument I never learned to play, let alone master, our clothes, the boxes, the books.
I can taste the Turkish coffee he made with cardamom on mornings when it didn't matter how I conducted my undomesticated, emotionally-animal self because his skin was warm and responsive, his kiss more immediate than my own lips, his hair so black where black and so white where white, and I could reach clumsily with my paw for the possibility that even a savage's dreams can come true.
I can taste the metallic surge on my tongue from fighting back tears of indignation that would have betrayed just how ill-prepared I was for his frequent departures from the bustling stations of my glass expectations.
I can taste his bitter silences, the sharp edges of which carved into my youthful illusions and ideals, leaving their jagged scars of knowledge that forced me to grow painful, bone-breaking inches.
I can taste the zeytun and the zoo, the ringing telephone and the dead branch that crashed just inches before me into a million splinters, the white sheets and the Cosmopolitans, the campus and the market, the laundromat and the moments chocked in cigarette smoke, his beautiful, erotic, human and humid body.
That summer had no gravity, language, or recognizable ending, and I continue to orbit inarticulately amidst the uncharted constellations of that intimate universe like a fatalistic satellite of limitless love, in the whisper of that seashell galaxy, an airborne particle roaming the intimate expanse of then, a past that shares a sun with now, with always, with Tariq.
Tariq and I are two grains of sand in a parsimonious hourglass others call God.
I stand without gender and attachment under an androgynous sky wishing that wars were waged with musical instruments instead of weapons, that conflicts were resolved by soldiers who fought not in battlefields, but in concert halls.
The page turns me.
Jackie looked stunning with her hair pulled tightly back. She reminded me of a Spanish dancer whose talent was to make others feel the center of attention. Mom also looked lovely and twice we slipped into the garage to smoke together. Her focus on me was overwhelming and when I turned to ash my cigarette out the side door I could feel the weight of her stare on my back. Whenever we're alone the air seems tinged with the tandem pulse of our biological connection, amniotic moments when I am acutely aware of my origins in her womb, and the immediacy of our cellular bond illuminates the futility of our many differences, and in that mutual moment I am nothing and no one else but my mother's son. Not a grown man forging his own way, but a pristine possibility forever originating from the molecular dreamscapes of her body's fecund depths.
Much to my relief everyone said I looked wonderful, not sickly, and indeed I felt handsome for the first time in a long while. With invisible down feathers I teased everyone- woman, man, relative, and friend. The questions I dreaded didn't have a chance in hell to be asked. I was the one asking all the questions, inquisitive, attentive.
My shyness tried to surface and lure me into quiet side-streets but I gracefully glided against the grinding gears of escape into circles, conversations, delightful one-on-one exchanges.
Aida is a stunning Serbian in her thirties. Tonight she wore a fitted knit dress that exposed her slender shoulders and high neck. She sat at my grandmother's immense dining table that was laden with numerous dishes, all of which Jackie had painstakingly prepared; a perfectionist's colorful feast. The chair next to Aida was empty and I took it despite my reserve and diffidence. She immediately acknowledged me with a socialite's enthusiasm. Sitting so close to her I could easily trace the length of her aquiline nose, which perfectly fitted her atypical face. We talked with great ease, which surprised me as we'd only met briefly once before. She said she loves living in San Francisco and spoke passionately of her zeal for cities, candidly confessed her disinterest in nature and rural living. I nodded as I listened, smiling in agreement that life in a city is a festival of unrehearsed experiences and time-bomb opportunities. She clasped her hands in the air before her and exclaimed, "I don't know, I love concrete!"
We talked about education, books, writing, and she seemed to possess the intelligence and sensitivity to appreciate my love for words. She was so authentically moved that she divulged her secret desire to someday tell her own story, searching the air with her inquisitive eyes for the right words, admitting that she regretted not having written about the war she lived through. She turned to me once more, her face interesting and captivating, and said, "I have a friend who is American but speaks my language. He insists I write and that he'll translate my work." She smiled warmly, an expression that trustingly revealed the true nature of this friendship, and added, "I would feel safe having him translate what I write because we know each other so well. He inspires me."
Aida's anesthesiologist cousin who seemed to be anesthetizing himself with successive glasses of red wine didn't share her angularity, but possessed his own roundness that was despite his cool edginess soft and to me handsome. The moment I stepped into the house I noticed him across the room, standing in the fluorescence of the kitchen, looking intently back at me. For those few and revealing seconds, when the door hadn't even closed behind me and I happened to look that way again, he was still surveying me. Upon introduction I was surprised to discover that this man, whose homoerotic glances would surreptitiously meet my own throughout the night, was the boyfriend of one of Jackie's girlfriends.
It was to remain unclear, all night as he avoided me, whether he desired me, resented me, or was simply shamefully fascinated by me. At any rate, his loyal glances made the already interesting evening all the more intriguing.
When Jackie brought in her famous Tiramisu, which I think she has finally perfected, I helped serve the guests. Aida's cousin, the homoerotic anesthesiologist, sat with an empty wineglass looking rather sheepish and mismatched with his girlfriend. I asked if he would care for a taste. He casually shrugged his broad shoulders, smiled shyly, and said he would. I handed him a plate, 'Sorry it's not a perfect slice.' "Oh, it's OK," he said politely, taking the dessert fork and napkin from me.
In the background of the party's quaint interactions Jackie played Arabic music; human relationships like optical illusions. Looking around me I was deeply struck with appreciation for having been rashly plucked from my birthplace and dropped in a nation where exiles from Iran, Serbia, and a young African American from Louisiana may come together as pieces of a new social structure.
Being back at the house that was for some formative years my home was at stolen moments nostalgic and jarring. But the many living memories were gracious and refrained from dominating me and diplomatically shared me with others.
Recently I stopped at St. James to visit my grandmother, who still at the age of seventy continues to work seven days a week at the business she started with the very nickles and dimes she saved working as a seamstress in Chicago- a city so giant, now frozen and blanketed by snow, now humid and stifling, that she admits it often confounded and terrified her; a divorced Christian immigrant from Iran, on her own, but determined. A complex woman who continues to demonstrate that ambition and integrity can exist harmoniously in one space and that a just person does not have to be victimized and crushed in an unjust world.
It was dark when I arrived at the rest home. She opened the door smiling. I tried to conceal my embarrassment for having fallen off the face of the earth, admittedly self-centered in my entanglements with my own petty problems and feelings. We gay men are impossibly immature and emotionally inept. Is it that we are childless, denied the humbling experience of loving someone else more than unsuccessfully struggling to love ourselves? Will we ever outgrow this myopic martyrdom, to which we are to extreme degrees committed, so that we can barely commit to one another?
My grandmother received me with welcoming blue eyes and led me to her private quarters, a familiar, warm space in which we used to meet and exchange our small discoveries, ideas, hopes and fears, eating together, drinking Turkish coffee and tea, laughing at ourselves when we weren't crying or fighting, where we blew out birthday candles and played card games. My resilient grandmother's world. Here we met on the beveled edge of our unique bond and talked about everything- past, present, uncertain future.
She placed her elbows on the tabletop, squinting ever so slightly, considered my face without attempting to mask her intentions, and made up her mind before promptly delivering her opinion, "I like your hair this short. Keep it at this length always. It suits you."
Her approval pleased me and I smiled, 'Really? You like it? You know, a friend cut it for me at home. I can save so much money by cutting my own hair.' I knew my frugality would please her.
I surveyed her as well, and said softly, 'You haven't lost the weight you promised to lose.'
She wrinkled her forehead, shook her blond head regretfully before speaking defiantly, "I'm never going to lose weight. This is how I am."
I suggested we weigh ourselves. Being a sport my grandmother led us to the scale in the bathroom. I registered a famished 155 pounds. She 185 pounds. Spontaneously we turned to the full-length mirror on the wall and standing side by side contemplated our polar reflection. We did not look remotely related. Silent reflection soon graduated to arbitrary chuckles, which in turn burst into outright fits of laughter until we were red in the face. I threw my arms around her just as genetic fate had thrown hers around us.
I don't want to kill myself. Instead I take street drugs and fall from other-worldly bridges that connect oceanic longings to earthly possibilities. Might the same potential that enabled us to crawl as infants, walk as toddlers, and eventually try to outrun our adult demons, afford us lyrical flight from the prosaic depths of reality, turning marble mores into quicksand and truly liberate us?
Tariq left a voicemail, having returned from a trip to the desert. We are like two diplomats from whom passion, like bandits, robbed diplomacy, pretense, punctuation, and perfection, leaving in their wake pandemonium of palpitations, that in a single pang contain more purity than a thousand preambles to a love that's approached with premeditated expectations and permanence.
Waiting out this overcast obsession that is winter itself. I think of summer drives to the Russian River, my arm hanging out the open window, on a paved road that softly roams lulling curves, through columnar trees that police the sun's vagrant rays that outsmart their stratified branches, filtering for a time in intermittent pools of warmth and light.
This winter my diary has been a paper ship steadily sailing contiguous oceans with superlunary waves of lyrical piracy. But it's also the sumptuous tent palace of a nomad who writes alone, without family or lovers. And yet, I always have the feeling that someone is here with me- a fellow traveler. Is it you?
Those who are many things at once fascinate me. A balance of multidimensional contrasts, not an imbalance of conflicts. I'm deeply drawn to the parable and the fable, allegory, Gibran hypnotics, Nin pyromania. I identify with the raw voice of writers who betray themselves with raspy transcendence and who aren't concerned with sounding pretty or looking good, but with immortalizing the moment without plot or formula, acknowledging the sexuality of words. The red leather pant leg of a sentence should move flirtatiously with erotic abandon.
Art remains the marrow that fills life's hollow skeleton of duties, responsibilities, and obligations. One needn't paint or write to be an artist in life; any person who transforms the lackluster hours of painful existence with love, compassion, selflessness, and is in this manner creative and courageous, is an artist. Every relationship his masterpiece, each exchange an opportunity to transform the mundane.
Jim, tall, striking gentleman in his sixties, is these days more gaunt than usual. He still manages to come into the restaurant for his Belgian waffle with orange butter, but foregoes his cup of coffee which he used to take black. Jim is dying. Gregarious, flirtatious, obviously once dashing Jim is dying and I regret not accepting over the years his many invitations for dinner and drinks.
It's vain but I feel beautiful again, vital, virile, naked even when clothed. Not hiding beneath pounds of self-consciousness. Yesterday I felt rebellious and dangerous, my thirst for freedom like live music. Without license and with alcohol on my breath I turned the engine, merged onto the highway, crossed the swaying bridge, over black ocean, through dark hills, my soul smoking. I passed through the tunnel and the fog like a thief, furtively entering the city of asphalt waves. Alone, rolling seductively in sheets of music, myself a single note in a score of many people, mostly men, shuffling bodies, bus stops, store fronts, taxis, swelling sidewalks.
I parked the car, grabbed my jacket, cigarettes, some money, and threw open the door, stood on the lightless street that dipped violently to the lights and bustle of Castro below, letting the lapping cold remind my expectant nerves that I am still alive, young, beautiful, and can expect further adventures and affairs. Casually, feeling present and flexible, intimate with my surroundings, I descended the falling street into the flux and fanfare of Castro on a Friday night.
Lights, concrete, flesh and sound intermingled drunkenly and nothing was at that hour inanimate. Every inch and crack of the sidewalk, upon which I relished the art of walking without destination, told a story, a secret, a lie, a joke. And willingly I believed every word, lapping up the vagrant, hustling phrases.
The clothes I wore brushed softly against my singing body. In darker storefront windows I glimpsed the gliding reflection of a striking image that fluidly moved alongside me, faithfully.
Men noticed me- some ostentatiously, others surreptitiously, some smiling back into my smiling eyes, others holding a prurient gaze. All were welcomed because what is more enjoyable than people-watching is being watched by people.
Women too responded to my sex and song, street sounds and heartbeats rhythmically aligned. Anticipation impudently bantered with urchin frivolity, laughter and chatter loitered in crowds like a band of rebellious teenagers who sought recognition, but wouldn't in a million years admit it. And although it did not rain, a river of coincidences flowed as plentifully as alcohol, desirous pools gathered and steamed, we were the thunder and the lightening, the hours sopped by torrential minutes.
It was impossible here, what with the ambush of flash downpours, to pause and think of war. I'm sure if you had mentioned war people would have looked at you as if you were mad.
Populated streets, many faces, smoking leisurely, strolling, flash flirting with time, space, vibrating sidewalks whose psychic reverberations chronicled the gay theatrics of city-smitten tourists and unimpressed locals alike, puzzle bits of overheard dialogue, the strangest echoes, flamboyant annunciations, overabundant exclamations, profanities, curious mumbles, another near-distant guffaw, neurotic taxis, streetcars vivified by electrical pangs and pulses, sparks showering the living street. Theater.
I reach deep into the panther's throat and extract the words, the spineless truths, piquant nuances, the greatest conflagrations in every innocuous ember, a passing exchange between transients that had a lasting impact, inscribing what survives, my elbows red and tender from pressing into the mattress for five consecutive hours, my right thumb throbbing from gripping the pen, middle knuckle chapped and cracked, burning, my back burning, my eyes burning. Feeble but fulfilled. Faint but fierce. Fetters and freedom. Fabric of fiction. Falconry of fables.
The artist lies when he speaks of creation because beneath the facade and gild of poetry he is ultimately destructive. Like a child he knocks down what he's built, out of curiosity? Control? And yet, isn't destruction prelude to creation, the root of creation? Isn't loss the liquid essence of life's certain flux? Aren't we perpetually losing one passing moment to another and another and so on? Don't we lose even the most authentic, ingenuous declarations that are exhaled with conviction and vehemence to the vacua of time as soon as they are expressed? Nothing stands still long enough to be considered viable.
Will a hope, though gravid with the heaviest words, buoyed by our most heartfelt assertions, prevail, take root and materialize, or be by mistimed turn of events unduly aborted? Does it matter? This death of unrealized dreams too remains an opportunity for greater dreams, more fortified, more lucid. One season's slow departure and inevitable transience permits another's imperious arrival. Here, nature's self-destructive instinct births cruel fairness.
All around him, in many things, the artist observes the natural balance of coexisting, contiguous contradictions, their tumultuous partnership. So, it seems, the artist doesn't lie when he creates and destroys, because he is in accord with nature. He is of nature. He depends on nature for the tools and vocabulary of his craft, while nature depends on him for its voice, its interpretation, its personification. He is its protector.
The artist is creation's draftsman and destruction's apprentice.
Queer, Palestinian, American, universally human Tariq. Being near him is akin to being shot through wind tunnels to overseas adventures and desires. I was out on the balcony when he arrived to pick me up. He stepped out of the clunker he bought for seven-hundred dollars onto the sunny street like he stepped out of my life, and the old unshakable exhilaration that's triggered at the very thought, mention, and sight of him shot flowers, shards of glass, and butterflies at my giddy heart.
We drove back to Oakland in the rattling old car, on open sunny highways and bridges, running a few errands along the way, catching up on each other's lives. We stopped at a farmers' market on a small side-street, strolling casually up and down the lane feeling quite like family- comfortable, familiar, sharing a history that is blurred by flashes of kisses, laughter, and letting go.
It was dark when we finally arrived at Tariq's apartment. He switched the light on and a furnitureless living room with a floor that was covered in stacks of loose papers was dramatically revealed. I set down the bags and stood in isles of papyrus towers, 'Tariq, you should take a picture of it. It's beautiful!' We spent the next two hours filing these papers, after which we prepared dinner as traditional Persian music played in the background. We lighted a candle, opened a bottle of red wine, sat down at the small table, and here in the light of the small flame Tariq and I were caressed by the moments' delicate touch, and we ate, sipped wine, talked lightly, paused comfortably, and laughed casually. The world beyond the apartment's door, insecure and uncertain, fell away completely. When I have my own home I will camouflage the front door as it remains an intrusive reminder that all departures are inevitable.
Around us hundreds of books, each like a living creature that was silent and unmoving but very much alive and breathing. After we'd eaten, organized Tariq's books, and cleaned the dishes, we decided it would be best that I spent the night. Tariq fetched me a pair of his pajamas which were faded and softened by years and while I changed into them he built for me a makeshift bed on the living room rug. "Is this OK?" he asked in a tone that was sincere and apologetic, his beautiful hazel eyes like pools into which I still secretly toss pennies, making whispered wishes.
It's embarrassing now to admit, but I had hoped that we'd sleep in his bed, Raymond being away in New York; as brothers, without sex. And I was inwardly, immaturely disappointed. But I know now, as I did then, settling into my flannel cocoon, that it was only appropriate that we sleep separately, and that anything else, no matter how platonic, would have been caricatural.
In the morning I slept in while Tariq quietly prepared breakfast. When I slowly awoke from a sleep that was deep and restful I remembered dreams of rocket ships blazing into distant stratospheres and enormous, rapacious sharks engaged in a feeding frenzy.
We spent the majority of the day going about our own tasks- Tariq preparing for a four-hour lecture and I reading passages from his books and writing. In the afternoon we took the BART into the city, ascended a broken escalator to the ground level, and on a bustling downtown corner parted ways. When I turned around Tariq was already swallowed up whole by the traffic.
The joy I felt all day was a sonorous stream that ebbed and slipped fluidly over the stones in my heart. Deep-seated and hushed, soft and whispering, it resonated throughout my bones, spreading like jolts of electricity to my teeth, skin, and hair, translating as sparks that leapt across great distances to touch others. By now I know that happiness, like the people we love, has a mind of its own, an agenda of its own, and in order to survive, flourish, and become stronger it has to live its own life, go to other people and places, experience life without us before returning, aged and hopefully wiser.
Yesterday I had an adventure in the city. Made friends along the way. Night was a concert hall out of doors. Life was jazz. Light was flirtation. The cold was our anchor that kept us from floating away into intoxicated skies. I feel revived.
Enough time has passed since my arrest to have gained some clarity.
After Tariq and I parted I felt acutely the luxury of being able to go anywhere I wished, be anyone I desired. The freedom in meeting strange new men, talking with them, flirting. At one bar Robert bought me a drink and we spent the rest of the night talking, laughing. We even took a taxi elsewhere to sing Karaoke. Our driver was a young, gregarious Russian who spoke broken English. Robert was pleasant and engaging the entire time and we sang many songs in the empty, out-of-the-way bar.
Midnight looks at me with closed eyes. I guess all that's left after all is said and done is to let the people I love forgive me so that I can be who I am with them, but a little changed. For the better, I hope.
It was a cold night with black eyes that were at war with time and tide. The waves whose darkest depths continue to drag our spirits through the muddiest truths brought us together again, and Jackie and I were positioned side by side on a sidewalk, hurrying to a theater in Mill Valley. Candid, patternless flickers revealed us in one breath old and young, revved and spent, broken and unbreakable. We saw the French film Amelie, enjoyed it and each other.
I don't make fervent wishes anymore; they make me. Like lava. Like humid summer minutes in the Midwest. Like music and blue talk across down pillows. I am sex in the brightest corner of the darkest howl. The wayward beacon of a remote lighthouse. The sharpest cliff. The most humorless drop. The most candid thrust. Sex in my movements and profile, shadow and wake. The coast that seduces a distant horizon. The shout in every tempered word. Sunflower. The light that fills a room in the morning after.
Sunshine was in me today and rays of light leaked and spilled out of my eyes onto tile, tables, catching customers by surprise, delighting, inspiring, making long-lost friends out of mere strangers. Earth no longer seems beneath higher beginnings, a flat, desert stretch and a prison to escape, but a destination in itself, a hard-earned privilege, a reward. My spirit, my soul, my being, my character move with the slow, assiduous rotations of planets and time, surviving the very magic of their dramatic inconsistencies, which seems to birth my difficult passage to peace, to heaven, which doesn't exist elsewhere or in the aftermath of our battered lives, but is at all times everywhere with us, even in our very own shadow. And my ego desires something virtually impossible- permanence of joy, joy's unlikely fidelity.
The many stoic columns and pillars that help me stand with humor in my heart against the humorless hours of life shake with desire for certainty, which is wanting, of course. The giddiness spreads like a rumor and I want it for everyone I know- my family, my orphaned friends. But to expect this kind of joy to survive all the colors of a life lived on the strings of a grand piano that someone left in the middle of a bustling intersection is dangerously foolish. It will be removed and destroyed.
With eyes of a heartbreaker I un-pave streets, avoiding susceptible hearts, seeking the strong. At a bar I ask someone if he'd like to get together for dinner some time. His eyes widen, "With you? Are you kidding me!?" Fiercely flattering.
I put on my favorite grey, pullover hooded shirt and slipped into the chilly residential street, strolling casually with my arms folded before me, past the always dark old house where the white standard poodle, like a ghost dog, sniffs about the overgrown hedge. Tonight the poodle and I startled each other, jumping like field mice in the dark, fast recovered, and continued about our business. I exchanged the usual pleasantries with the young man behind the counter at the charming tobacco shop on the corner, his smiling eyes dark but warm. Unable to contain my finger-tapping curiosity any longer, I said, 'I hope you don't mind me asking, but where are you from?' The young man with a flash of fingers on register keys met my eyes and without pause answered, "Iran." I smiled, 'I'm Assyrian, but I was born in Shiraz.'
The old man who always keeps a few feet away, always reticent but polite, stepped forward, pointed to the young man, and spoke for the first time, "He was born in Shiraz too!"
'Really? I was very small when we left Shiraz. We moved to Tabriz, then Tehran.'
In English and broken Farsi the three of us had a short but nostalgic exchange about a time and a place now dreamlike and unreal.
It is at times like these when it heavily dawn on me that Iran did not happen yesterday, but twenty years ago. That it was twenty years ago when I was a child who in the black of power outages shook with terror at the shrill scream of air raid drills and vagrant missiles striking in the near-distance. A child who huddled in a ball of chattering bones I could not for the life of me, no matter how fervently I believed in miracles and God, fold further and smaller in a chair with my mother, who carried on entertaining neighbors in the feeble light of a lone candle as if nothing were out of the ordinary, serving pastries and Turkish coffee, waiting for the house to stop rattling, waiting for the battery-operated radio to tell us it was now safe to blow out the candles, turn on the lights, eat a pastry, and stand as I would by the fascinating fish bowl and let my tired eyes swim with the always two and beloved goldfish, wondering: Was another child, elsewhere, one like me, hurt, maimed, orphaned, or killed tonight?
Compassion accompanied by the beginnings of a silent fascination with death- a Christian, adolescent, natural curiosity. Though war was long and pervasive childhood remained more profound and shaping, a beautiful right that was delicate, but almost impervious to the causalities of somber reality. Death was not at all times heralded by tanks and missiles, but transient goldfish, so many goldfish, and canaries. I did not know then, as I sneaked stray cats into the house, while I played with my beloved plastic animal figurines under crowded dining room tables where my imaginary jungle smelled of leather shoes, where I came to accept the existence of floral panties and runs in stockings as I did Jesus, war, and dying goldfish, that I would one day end up American, in San Francisco, this.
I was a philosophical child in a sub-table universe.
In Farsi I admitted, 'I miss Iran so much. I hope I see it one more time.'
The old man's eyes welled with tears, so I solemnly bid them farewell before the individual strands of our exiled experiences became further entangled in nostalgic tethers. Back outside, the American street now seemed so clean and contrived, lacking personality and the presence of children of color playing in the dirt that would prepare them for dirtier, more detrimental games yet ahead. With every certain step and breath I slowly returned to the new world, which I have a tendency to push away when it attempts to adopt me, suspicious of it as long as it continues to deny me citizenship. Perhaps it means well, I don't know. But at what cost? As long as I am compliant, obsequious? And as soon as I am myself, marred, imperfect, insubordinate, it will reject me? Sometimes, even after twenty years of being here, feeling at times even American here, having grown up here, loved and wept here, flown and crashed here, dreamed out loud without an accent here, I know that beyond a physical relationship I am no one here.
But enough of these copper fears that dent my tongue with flavorless imaginings for which the English language didn't bother to invent words.
I prefer the immediate textures of being in the moment, which my body translates in a language far superior to English, Assyrian, Farsi, or Japanese for that matter! A language far more delicate, complete, expressive, and honest, not enslaved by words that are only heard by inhospitable ears that ring and buzz with preoccupied indifference.